The Chosen Seed: The Dog-Faced Gods Book Three (DOG-FACED GODS TRILOGY)

by Sarah Pinborough

  It was a question he’d asked himself hundreds of times over the years, and the conclusion he always reached was that even had he chosen differently, it wouldn’t have made any difference: someone else would have shot the kid, there was no doubt about that, and once they’d shot the kid, Freeman would have wondered why someone with Charlie’s supposed credentials hadn’t pulled the trigger himself. The kid was dead either way, and the officer more than likely.

  Cass had done the only thing he could to ensure his own survival. In the cold darkness of night, he saw that clearly; what kept him awake was whether survival was always the right thing. For the first time since he’d arrived at Brian Freeman’s house, Cass felt the ghosts drawing closer, finding their places in the corners of his room and round the sides of the furniture, only their clawing hands visible. He knew more of the dead than the living, and one day they’d realise that and drag him down as one of their own.

  The house was warm, but he shivered as he sat up, feeling claustrophobic. He itched to get out in the freezing air, just for a walk, to clear his head of his demons and focus on tomorrow. So much now lay in Maric’s hands: getting into those systems was the route to finding Luke – he was sure of it. Carrying his shoes with him he crept silently through the sleeping house. He found a set of house keys in the kitchen drawer and slipped them in his pocket. The light in the downstairs room was still on, and when he peered in he saw Brian Freeman snoring softly, his head tilted backwards. Papers had fallen from his lap to the floor and Cass fought the urge to replace them. He carefully pulled the door closed. Slipping his shoes on, he left the house.

  ‘You’ve got to look up, Charlie.’

  At three o’clock in the morning the city was eerily quiet. Cass asked the black cab to wait for him, and the driver was amenable. Even though it was December and the office party season had kicked in, the night shift were simply cruising the deserted streets. London hadn’t regained its footing after the bombings and with this new bug scare people clearly preferred keeping to the relative safety of their own homes to celebrate the festive cheer.

  Cass closed the door behind him. As he turned the corner the chug of the engine was still audible. There was something comforting about it, he thought, as he stared at the impressive building. Most of its windows were still alight. Of course he had come here to focus his thinking: The Bank’s headquarters, the old MI6 building. Where else was there for him to go? Somewhere inside there, Freeman’s mole was studiously working away, and someone else’s computer and photos and files would be in his dead brother’s office, as if Christian had never existed.

  His breath came out in a mist, and he added to it by lighting a cigarette. His fingers numbed quickly outside of his coat pocket, but he didn’t care. The hot smoke was good. Was Mr Bright in there now? he wondered. His eyes scanned the building for that elusive extra floor. Which was it? The apartment had been high up, he knew that. Mr Bright was the kind of man who liked to survey the world, keep an eye on all the pieces in the game. There are no coincidences. Wheels within wheels. Mr Bright and Mr Solomon, and a world of mysteries in between that somehow had the Jones family, and Luke especially, at the heart of it. Luke: the faceless boy; the relative who was a stranger.

  He sniffed hard, his nose starting to run. Right now all his drive was focused on finding the boy, but what did he really intend to do when he found him – raise him? A cop on the run and an orphaned kid – surely that was just the premise for a bad Hollywood movie; no way it could work in the real world. Why was he doing any of this? He wasn’t father material, that was obvious; maybe that just wasn’t in their blood. There was very little that was good about the Jones family. His father had given away his grandson to protect his own freedom, and Cass had shot a teenager in cold blood. He flicked the glowing cigarette onto the slick, dark pavement and shoved his hands back into his coat. The last thought wasn’t entirely correct.

  He looked up at the sleek lines of metal and steel, glowing in the night: it looked like some kind of heavenly citadel, bringing hope to a battered world. Ghosts whispered to Cass from its shadows. Christian Jones had been a good man – the white sheep of their particular flock. Cass may not have spent much time figuring that out while his younger brother was still alive, but he knew it now, and that was why he was going to find the boy. For his dead little brother, who had asked him to. What came after would figure itself out. He owed Christian – for Jessica, at the very least. He turned his back on the building that had come to represent his nemesis and walked back towards the purring taxi. He could live with a murder on his conscience, but he couldn’t live with ignoring Christian’s last request. And besides, Mr Bright had it coming.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  DeVore was tired. It had reached the stage where he constantly felt slightly sick and his eyes grated against their lids when he closed them. For a while he wondered if maybe the Dying had found him – he’d started to expect it; after all, it had claimed those far greater than himself. But after running tests on himself the truth became apparent: he was simply exhausted. He hadn’t rested properly in the months since the Interventionists Bellew had taken had chosen to die. Since then, the rest, housed in their pods, had become listless, vacant. He expected stillness from them – it had been a long time since they had physically moved; their Reflections explored the world for them – but this apathy was something new. Most of the screens around the room had been blank for more than a month, and those who were projecting were just throwing up random images that made no sense; they hinted at madness. This awful quiet had stolen his sleep.

  He poured a coffee from the jug beside his desk in the outer chamber. It was the middle of the night and he didn’t need to be here; the technicians in the thought chamber would come and get him if there were any significant changes or projections. He should be relaxing upstairs, in his sprawling living quarters high up in the building – better than that, he should be asleep. He sipped the hot liquid, enjoying its strong bitterness. Well, if he couldn’t sleep, then he might as well have something to help him stay awake. Once he’d drunk it, he’d go in and see them, soothe them.

  A realisation had dawned on him during the past difficult months: strange as the Interventionists were, he was fond of them. He had been here such a long time that they had become family to him. Mr Bright might be the Architect, but DeVore had his own smaller triumph – he had built the House of Intervention.

  When the women had started this phase of their transformation, only he had taken the time to recognise their potential; only he had had the foresight to harness it, to develop the methods to interpret their thoughts. For a while the place had felt as much like a prison as a castle, so far away from everything, but after a while he’d realised it was his achievement.

  Until he’d had the House, he’d thought himself lacking compared with the others. He’d been barely a Fourth Cohort, swept along with the revolt, rather than being an active part of it. He wasn’t stupid: he’d known how Mr Bellew and Mr Craven and others had mocked him in the old days. And Mr Bright and Mr Solomon had barely known of his existence until he’d discovered the Interventionists. But then he’d been given a place in the First Cohort and met the First himself. He had become someone important – maybe not be as glorious as those who had led them here, but he had achieved something, and that was more than many.

  Now, however, that achievement was crumbling. He’d been in the House for so long, hidden in the heart of the cold mountains so far away from the machinations of the rest of the world, that it had become his safe place, and like the Interventionists themselves, he only now travelled when summoned. Would he soon be left with nothing but living ghosts for company? Or were the Interventionists finally preparing for the next stage of whatever strange path they had been on since they arrived here?

  He didn’t want them to leave him: he loved them, and on some level he thought they might love him too.

  He jumped slightly when the intercom buzzed on his desk.

/>   ‘You need to come to the thought chamber now, sir.’ The urgency in the young man’s voice – Stoldt, was it? – was unmistakable. ‘They’re projecting. All of them.’

  DeVore’s heart leapt and he put the cup down on the desk so hard that coffee slopped over the side, but he didn’t even notice.

  The room was filled with a high-pitched keening that made his ears ache so much he thought they might bleed. The sound was coming from the fat bodies of the Interventionists lying rigid in their pods, their black eyes staring directly upwards, even though their mottled mouths weren’t moving. DeVore had barely glanced at them; his attention was focused on the vast screens.

  For a moment he couldn’t speak, so glorious was the sight, and so terrible. It had been a long time since he’d seen anything like it: the beauty of so many of his kind in their honest form, huge, Glowing – perfect. The skies were filled with them.

  ‘This can’t be right,’ he said at last. ‘Is this from their memory, do you think? The war?’ The Interventionists hadn’t projected backwards before, but that didn’t mean they weren’t capable of it.

  ‘No,’ the man beside him said. There was a slight tremble in his voice that DeVore hadn’t noticed before. Was that fear? ‘I thought that at first. But then— Well, wait and see. There’s more.’

  DeVore watched as they came from the sky in all their furious glory. Behind them the trumpeters, silent on screen, heralded the warriors with music he knew would deafen the humans below. The scene was magnificent and terrifying and awe-inspiring. There were so many of them he could scarcely comprehend it, not after all this time. His eyes widened. This was only the beginning; He would not be far behind. As the army marched, the blue sky was lost in gold and silver so bright that DeVore flinched. It would blind those below – them – their eyes would burn in flames.

  ‘But this can’t be right,’ he whispered as the Earth came into view and he saw the ashes of the destroyed cities, people wandering crying through the wreckage of their civilisation. They were blind and deaf, and doomed. There were two kinds of dead lying broken amidst the rubble; they had fled together and they had died together. Above them the sky danced in a blaze of victory.

  The sun vanished and the husk of the Earth was left for ever in the midnight darkness of space. For a moment neither man spoke. Eventually, the cycle of images started again, as if on a loop.

  ‘Look,’ the technician breathed. ‘Look at them.’

  DeVore tore his eyes from the horror playing out in front of him and looked down into the nearest pod. Tears were streaming from the dark eyes, sliding down the unhealthily fat cheeks and into the matted hair.

  ‘They’re crying,’ he whispered. ‘All of them.’

  DeVore looked back at the screen. He needed to speak to Mr Bright; it looked like the Dying was now the least of their worries.

  ‘Keep monitoring them,’ he said, turning his back on the doctor who was still looking at the weeping Interventionists. ‘And get a full team in here now. If anything in that sequence changes, I want to know. The slightest thing.’

  ‘Mr DeVore.’ The doctor looked up, and DeVore stopped. They never called him by name, it was always ‘sir’.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘They’re all projecting it – all of them.’

  ‘I’m not blind. What’s your point?’

  ‘They normally each show different possible futures, don’t they? When information is requested—?’

  ‘This information wasn’t requested,’ DeVore snapped.

  ‘I know that, but if they’re all projecting the same images … Does it mean that this is the only possible future?’

  A fearful silence hung between them for a long second.

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ DeVore said. ‘Nothing in the future is decided.’

  His decisive tone did nothing to slow his own heartbeat as he walked quickly back to his office. The sound of that awful keening echoed in his ears, and black spots danced across his eyes. Whatever the outcome, He was coming, that much was for sure. His hand was sweating when he picked up the phone.

  Mr Bright was glad to find his palms were still dry when he replaced the receiver after DeVore’s call. He left his office behind and stepped back out into the main living room. Most of the room was in darkness, with only a pale blue glow coming through the large windows from outside, where so much life refused to let the city ever be truly dark.

  He glanced back for a moment at the closed study door next to his own. The name plaque still read MR SOLOMON, despite his repeated promises to himself that he would remove it. For a moment he considered sitting behind his old friend’s desk, but decided against it; the memory of that light, brilliant smile would make him melancholy, and there was no time for sentiment now. He could not afford to be weak.

  He walked across and stood by the window, which stretched from the floor to the high ceilings, and stared out at everything and nothing. DeVore would send him the projections, but he didn’t need to see them – he didn’t want to see them. If He was coming, then all of this would be destroyed. There would be no mercy.

  He sighed and forced his mind away from the possible – the likely – coming destruction of all that he had built. Right now there were other things that demanded his attention. There were always puzzles and deceits with their kind, and as they had passed that trait on to them, nothing was ever straightforward. Ergo, he concluded, as the clock ticked around to 3.15 a.m., there would be nothing straightforward about this projection either. If He was coming in the manner the Interventionists declared, then why was there an emissary among them? Why send a communicator? He was too arrogant to think they might have developed ways to fight against a multitude of their own, even if they had such a capability that wouldn’t also result in a destroyed Earth.

  The answer was obvious: it was about the First. He would save the First, of course – and He might even save Mr Bright himself, purely to drag him back home and humiliate him for all eternity before finally destroying him. No, that was an outcome that would never happen. Mr Bright had built this place and he would stay with it. It was his home now. Perhaps He had sent the emissary to find the First before the attack – that was likely. But if that was the case, then why had the First not mentioned it? The emissary would be calling out in the old ways – was the First simply too weak to hear it?

  His mind lingered on the old man and the boy. Despite how successful everything had been, something still disturbed him. He thought for a bit, and decided it was that conversation with the First, and his mention of Jarrod Pretorius, and his strangely exaggerated surprise at the mention of the emissary. As his frustration grew, Mr Bright felt himself Glow slightly and his senses heightened. The clock ticked too loudly; his heart beat too fast. A black cab chugged somewhere in the quiet street below.

  He turned away from the window and reluctantly let the Glow go. The world dimmed again, darkening like his thoughts. What was his old friend playing at? Betrayal? He couldn’t believe it – he wouldn’t believe it, not after everything they had done together. But still DeVore’s final words wouldn’t leave him: how could an invented myth come true?

  It’s the Rapture, he’d said. It’s coming.

  Climbing the stairs, Mr Bright was surprised to find himself thinking of Cassius Jones. The wild card. He lay down, shut his eyes and tried to sleep. He might be coming, but there were still moves in this game to be played out. And Mr Bright had learned to play the game well.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It was a clear, bright December morning, but there was no hint of that inside Dr Richard Shearman’s house. All the curtains were drawn, and the narrow beams of light that managed to creep through the cracks illuminated hundreds of dust motes, hanging in the air. Hask sat on the sofa and Ramsey joined him. There were sweat patches under Shearman’s arms, and he fiddled with his hands – he was surprisingly nervous for a man who’d already been charged.

  Hask smiled at him.

  He didn’t smile ba
ck. ‘What do you want?’ Shearman glanced over to the covered windows and then back again. He’d ushered them inside the house very quickly, and he clearly wasn’t happy about the visit. Did he think he was being watched?

  ‘You could be more polite,’ Ramsey said. ‘At least you’re not on remand in prison – trust me, this is better.’

  ‘That had nothing to do with you,’ Shearman snapped. ‘Everyone knows I’m no risk – the judge was quite clear on that. I’m as gutted as everyone else that those kids killed themselves weeks after leaving my facility; all I did was try to help cure them of their phobias. All you’ve got is some discrepancies with cash payments and records, and I’ve got nothing more to add to my version of events.’ He spat out the well-rehearsed speech, and then stared at them defiantly.

  There was something rather childish about it, Hask decided. Dr Shearman was not a strong man.

  ‘Tell us about Mr Bright,’ Hask asked quietly.

  ‘I don’t know anyone by that name,’ he snapped, but the doctor’s physical reaction told a different story: he’d recoiled as if punched.

  Hask fought the urge to look over at Ramsey. On their way over he and the DI had agreed that to get any truth out of Shearman, usable or not, they were going to have to hit him hard and fast, take him off guard. He wasn’t sure either of them had expected their ploy to work quite so quickly. Dr Shearman definitely knew a Mr Bright, as evinced by the man’s wide eyes and growing sweat patches.

  ‘Why would DI Cass Jones have been so interested in you?’ Ramsey took up the baton and Shearman’s head whipped round to him.

  He swallowed, and started, ‘What do you mean? He was in charge of the suicides investigation—’

  ‘But it wasn’t through that investigation that he found you, was it?’ Ramsey smiled, and leaned forward, as if inviting a confidence. ‘He found you through a private investigator he’d hired to track his missing nephew. The link to the suicides was just a bonus, I believe.’